Authors: Axjonow, Anastasia
Title: The impact of financial and non-financial disclosure on corporate reputation among non-professional stakeholders
Language (ISO): en
Abstract: This dissertation deals with non-financial disclosure, erroneous financial disclosure, and their impact on corporate reputation among non-professional stakeholders. First, we analyze the organization of corporate social responsibility activities and the disclosure of these activities by German SMEs. We find that SMEs implement many CSR activities. However, they are often faced by certain difficulties and challenges when implementing these activities. Moreover, the findings show that stand-alone CSR reporting is still less common among SMEs than among large companies. Second, the dissertation investigates the quality of forecasts in stand-alone CSR reports. We provide evidence that the quality is insufficient and the published forecasts are hardly able to provide decision-useful information. Hence, we provide important implications for standard setters to offer more detailed forecast reporting requirements for CSR disclosure. Third, the dissertation comprises an analysis of the relation between CSR disclosure and corporate reputation among non-professional stakeholders for German and US firms. We show that the issuance of stand-alone CSR reports has no impact on corporate reputation among non-professional stakeholders. Moreover, we demonstrate that stakeholder type and CSR disclosure source play an important role in influencing reputational perceptions, offering important practical implications for companies when deciding where to publish CSR information, depending on the stakeholder group to be addressed. The last part of the dissertation focuses on the impact of unethical behavior, namely the disclosure of erroneous financial information, on corporate reputation among non-professional stakeholders. We provide evidence of a negative association between accounting misstatements and corporate reputation as perceived by non-professional stakeholders. This result demonstrates that firms’ accounting misstatement activities indeed harm corporate reputation among non-professional stakeholders. To summarize, this thesis provides important insights for standard setters concerning the disclosure of forecast information in CSR reports and for firms, regarding reactions of non-professional stakeholders to ethical behavior in form of CSR disclosure and unethical behavior in form of accounting misstatements. Investigations of non-professional stakeholders are underrepresented in prior accounting research. Hence, this dissertation sheds light on the reputational reactions of these important stakeholder groups to corporate reporting.
Subject Headings: Corporate reputation
Corporate social responsibility disclosure
Non-professional stakeholders' perceptions
AAERs
Accounting misstatements
Restatements
Subject Headings (RSWK): Stakeholder
Corporate social responsibility
Informationspflicht
Bericht
Unternehmen
Prestige
Laie
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2003/36036
http://dx.doi.org/10.17877/DE290R-18053
Issue Date: 2017-07
Appears in Collections:Lehrstuhl für Internationale Rechnungslegung und Wirtschaftsprüfung

Files in This Item:
File Description SizeFormat 
Dissertation_Axjonow.pdfDNB2.61 MBAdobe PDFView/Open


This item is protected by original copyright



This item is protected by original copyright rightsstatements.org